


Still Life with Black Oil

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23132137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: After Sammy moves in with Ben, they reset their sleep schedules.
Relationships: Ben Arnold & Sammy Stevens
Comments: 10
Kudos: 70





	Still Life with Black Oil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [testdrive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/testdrive/gifts).



> Filling in some of the domestic gaps between 75 and the Chronicles part 3. 
> 
> Having a bad sleeping schedule is murder on your depression and I wanted to give Sammy some light.

Ben drives Sammy home. In the side mirror, Sammy watches his car diminish into the grey of predawn. His body is heavy and unfamiliar, dripping rainwater on Ben’s seat cushion; beside him, he can feel the presence of Ben’s body, the warmth. He doesn’t know where to look. He can’t bear to see the road under the headlights, the thinning sky, Ben in silhouette with his elbows locked. He can’t bear the thickness in his throat.

Sammy presses two fingers to his wrist and closes his eyes until he can feel his radial pulse in his eyelids, his ears, the soles of his feet. He is here and alive, full of blood but not bleeding. His body is real, and he is still in it.

That has to count for something. That has to be enough, if not by his count, by someone’s.

The car shudders across the uneven highway, its roar white noise in Sammy’s head. Occasionally, Ben’s fingers drum across the wheel, tap out a melody on leather; occasionally, a hum like a whisper comes out of Ben’s barely parted lips, only to fall silent.

Sammy doesn’t notice when they enter King Falls, although some time after they do, he picks up on the tension emanating from Ben’s body. The roads grow bumpier and Ben drives more slowly, and still Sammy can’t bring himself to look. Ben takes back roads, goes slow over cliffsides with no shoulders. Sammy can hear the wet sound of Ben opening his mouth.

Without saying anything, Ben pulls into the parking spot outside Sammy’s apartment where Sammy parks, in clear view of the kitchen window.

“Whatever you need,” says Ben, “bring it out now.” After Sammy leaves the vehicle, Ben only idles long enough to lock it.

Sammy retrieves the key to his apartment from an envelope half-under the front door, but Ben has to do the unlocking, because Sammy’s hands shake and jab the key everywhere but into the keyhole.

With the sun greying the mountaintops, Sammy steps inside, but he can’t move until Ben reaches around him and flips the switch.

The harsh light fills the space. It isn’t a nice apartment like Ben’s, a place to build a home. They stand at the head of a narrow hallway, at the end of which is a closet used for linens, the laundry machine, and the vacuum, its door ajar. There are three doors leading to the kitchen (bare, cabinet doors closed, table devoid of receipts or papers or folded napkins, dish rack itself set out to dry), the bathroom (medicine cabinet emptied, mirror and shower door wiped down), and the bedroom (dingy curtains drawn across the window, closet empty, blank white walls and no shoes beside the bed or books on the desk).

It doesn’t feel like coming home, but everything is as Sammy left it. Feet heavy, he steps forward, and his foot brushes the stack of Ben’s things beside the door, books and DVDs, sweatshirts, gloves, a travel mug (washed), a small houseplant leaning against the wall.

Oh, well. He might as well get this over with.

Sammy enters the bedroom. At least he’d thought to do the work before he left. He knows he left what he wanted his landlord to come back to. His suitcases—one for himself, bulging with new acquisitions; two for Jack, also bulging, because Sammy couldn’t decide what to leave behind—lie in a row on the made bed, its comforter folded into sharp hospital corners and turned down at the head. If he had one more case, it would have gone on the floor.

If he was smarter, Sammy thinks, he would have stripped the bed. He would have washed the linens and put them in the closet.

Ben hovers in the hallway, not letting Sammy out of his sight. It is a trust fall; though Sammy doesn’t look back, he can feel the presence of Ben’s shoulder, his hand raised between them at the small of Sammy’s back.

God, to think he would leave it like this.

Ben echoes the sentiment. “Jesus.” It looks like the scene of a crime. It looks so carefully abandoned that Sammy wants to vacate, wants to leave the suitcases and flee, or unzip them and dump their contents all over the floor just for something lived-in for someone to walk in on. But the only ones walking in are him and Ben, and there is still so much to take care of.

Ben carries the suitcases down the narrow steps, grunting with the exertion and then laughing, lightly, like a handwave. Coming back up, he takes Sammy’s elbow in one hand and the pile of his things in the other. “Ready to go?”

When Sammy nods, Ben puts the houseplant in Sammy’s arms and leads him to the car. In a feat of superhuman willpower, Ben has fit all three cases into the trunk of his tiny vehicle. Sammy watches him shut the trunk before sliding into the passenger seat.

No act of God could surpass an act of Ben Arnold, Sammy thinks.

The second journey passes just as vacantly as the first, except this time Ben doesn’t hum or tap on the wheel, just looks through the windshield as he drives into the sun. Patches of the road are still shiny from rain. Sammy catches Ben’s sideways stare half a dozen times, Ben’s mouth parted, his eyes a pale brown from the way the light falls on them.

The blue of dawn still clings to the corners of buildings, to the leaves of trees beside the sidewalk, over the expanse of road as Ben pulls up to his apartment. His place is not institutional; even the paneling of the building looks worn, the windowpanes blurry in the corners, the copper address number blackened. It’s an intimate, two-story affair, and Sammy knows from mornings after the show that from the parking lot, he will see the sun rise orange over the building. But it is still dark when Sammy follows Ben up the stairs, the suitcase in his hand lighter than he remembers it being when he set it out the night before.

The place is bigger than Sammy’s, its walls a gentle brown. The hallway is wide enough that Ben can carry two suitcases through it at his sides. They pass the kitchen without looking and enter the comfortable living room, its sofa brown and paisley but soft. Beside the TV cabinet sits an old gaming console in a puddle of cords, and on it rests a book (spine up; Ben may not have realized he left it that way; God forbid Emily should see), a mug with a tea bag thread hanging over the lip, one of Merv’s unsigned contracts, folded, a scrawl like a grocery list across the bottom of it. The wall behind the television is plastered with a greenish retro wallpaper, parts faded in the shape of picture frames, as though whoever lived here before Ben was more sentimental.

Ben pushes the coffee table against the far wall, where it squats beneath the long window, scattered with an array of literature, tourism pamphlets and museum histories Sammy is sure Ben has never read.

To the left, an open doorway leads to another small hallway, in the middle of which lies the bathroom. With the door half-ajar, Sammy can see that it is narrow and cluttered, Ben’s things spilling across every surface.

Sammy stacks his suitcases in the corner of the room while Ben puts sheets on the sofa bed. He pushes Jack’s beside the coffee table, beneath the window through which the orange sun casts light on the far walls and across Ben’s unruly curls, and sets his own suitcase beside them.

While Ben struggles with the far corner of the bed, Sammy unzips one of Jack’s suitcases. At first he is furtive, squatting between it and Ben, lifting the top just enough to see color, but Ben says nothing. Inside, clothing is folded meticulously, lovingly, untouched for three years. It isn’t right, to have this open, not in front of Ben. Not in front of himself.

Sammy remembers where he has put everything. He pulls out an old hoodie and unfolds it, the chest plastered with the logo of a sports summer camp Jack worked at during college. It is big enough for Jack’s muscled shoulders and certainly big enough for Sammy, who had the advantage of height.

Sammy strips off his sweater and his sweat-soaked overshirt and pulls the hoodie on. He lets it bunch around his head and keep Ben out, King Falls, the woods and the wetlands he has come from. On the inside it smells like Jack, like Sammy hopes Jack smelled, of sweat and early-evening runs, coffee and home and love, love. Sammy breathes deeply.

He couldn’t recreate this if he tried.

After smoothing the hoodie over his waist, he looks up. Ben is sitting on the bed, watching the blank television. Sammy’s hair has come loose in the exchange of clothing. He pries the hair tie out, and the hair hits his shoulders, falls heavy and warm around his sweat-cool neck, covers his ears.

“Your hands,” says Ben.

“What?” Sammy his hands up. They’re filthy; dirt-covered, blood-streaked, crisscrossed with lines of black scabs. “Oh. It’s nothing.”

“It’s going to get infected,” says Ben. He does not ask what happened. He says, “We have to take care of that.”

Ben brings the first-aid kit out of the bathroom and takes Sammy into the kitchen. The square table is pressed against the wall, three build-yourself chairs pushed in. Ben sits opposite the wall, so he can reach Sammy’s hands without stretching. Their knees bump. Sammy sets his hands on the table as Ben pulls out a crumpled box of Band-Aids, a tube of bacitracin, an array of towels.

The cuts go up into the sleeves of his hoodie.

Ben wets a washcloth and wipes away the dirt until Sammy can see his skin, avoiding areas with the ugliest scabs. His actions are gentle as he turns Sammy’s hands over, teasing fingers apart. It stings, or maybe it is just unfamiliar to be touched with such tenderness.

Sammy is still shaky, his hands unsure of how to be hands. But Ben shows him, brushes his fingers across the undersides of knuckles, cups Sammy’s palms in his own. Ben bends Sammy’s fingers until Sammy remembers what hands are for.

With the wetted corner of a kitchen towel, Ben massages crusts and scabs from Sammy’s skin, letting them fall forgotten onto the table. When the blood starts, Ben tears open Band-Aids with his teeth. He uses the towel to staunch the blood flow, then quickly and precisely covers them with plaster. Sammy’s blood stains the pale blue towel, clumps in its grooves, soaks through when Ben mops up a drip.

There should not be this much blood.

But Ben doesn’t once let Sammy’s hands go. He says, “You’re gonna be okay.”

The overhead light casts deep shadows under their hands, under their bodies bent together at the table, under the locks hanging over Ben’s forehead. Ben covers Sammy’s hands with plaster – thick ones across the backs, circular ones at the base of his thumbs. Sammy’s knuckles twitch stiffly.

When Sammy’s hands look like skin again, Ben says, softly, “Will you be able to sleep?”

Sammy props his elbows on the table and examines his hands in the light. He is waiting for that wounded-animal voice, that roadside-deer voice. He says, “I might put on some TV. How thick are the walls around here?”

“Oh, I sleep like a rock,” says Ben. “Also, I have loads of DVDs you can use, just in case, you know, Channel Thirteen. You know how to work the player.” He fits the unused plasters back into the box, and packs that and the balm into the kit. “Do what you need to, man. Blankets and pillows are in the hall closet.”

There is a blanket in the backseat of Sammy’s car, miles down the road, crumpled like an unloved child. Some nights Sammy pretends it smells like Jack, wears it around his shoulders as he prepares dinner; some mornings he holds it to his chest like a body.

“Speaking of. One second,” says Ben in his inspired voice. He pushes back his chair, bundles the first-aid kit in his arms, and leaves the kitchen.

As soon as he is gone, Sammy pulls the hoodie sleeves over his wrists. The room is darker for Ben’s absence, smaller even though no body hovers close to Sammy’s, emptier. Sammy is alone with his hands and Jack and the yellow overhead, and he shivers.

It looks like Ben has lived here all his life, between the notes and photos on the fridge, the overflowing magazine rack on the counter beside the half-empty knife rack, the pair of sandals beneath the table that Sammy keeps kicking.

Ben is saying Sammy’s name from down the hall, not calling it but getting louder all the same.

And when Ben returns with a vibrant blanket clutched to his chest, the light comes with him.

“You might get cold out there,” he says, matter-of-factly, even though it is May and the heating is on and Sammy is wearing a thick sweater he fully intends to sleep in.

Sammy smiles. “I might.”

“Stand up.” Ben unfurls the blanket like a banner, so that Sammy can see the image of Optimus Prime printed across it. It doesn’t come near the floor; it must be a memento from childhood, stored somewhere easy to access. The foot of his bed, perhaps, or a high closet shelf. Sammy had not seen it in his many visits to Ben’s before.

As Ben approaches, Sammy pushes the chair back and stands, leaving the towel on the table. With a graceful movement, Ben puts the blanket around Sammy’s shoulders, pulling it close. It is light and soft, but it also matted, stiff in places against Sammy’s neck. Well-loved; adored, even. It traps the ends of his hair against his body.

Ben’s palm brushes the back of Sammy’s neck, the side, as Sammy reaches up to pull the blanket across his chest, to swaddle himself like a child. Even through the hoodie, it is warm: from Ben’s body heat, maybe, or from his love.

Sammy’s legs tremble. Then the full weight of the blanket falls on him.

“There,” says Ben, and what he means is, _You’re safe with me, now._ “You’re steadier already. Try to get some sleep.”

But he waits until Sammy leaves the room to turn the lights off.

* * *

In the first dream, the man who could be Jack but who has hair like lightning is walking away from him up a long, steep path cut through the woods. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and the man who could be Jack is almost obscured by the fog and the woods get darker like ocean water. Like after all this time he’s still in Florida, right back where he started.

In the dream, Sammy is walking but he does not know where to. He is following the man who could be Jack, so certain he could touch him and that would be enough to bring him home. Maybe his hand is outstretched in the dream. But the further Sammy walks, the darker the tree trunks grow.

He is walking but every step feels like stepping on lightning. He has to keep walking; if he stops, he will sink and drown.

The man who could be Jack turns and looks at him with eyes black from end to end. Horrified, Sammy holds that gaze, and it isn’t Jack, but the lips are the same, the gap in his teeth.

And then it is as though those awful eyes pop, and black pours out of them, pools in his lower eyelids. Within seconds the figure succumbs to the deluge, oil-black and glistening everywhere, his eyebrows raised. Black drips all over his teeth, gathers behind his bottom lip and drops all at once down the front of his shirt.

Sammy can feel a sound being ripped out of him like a scream, his vocal cords shredding. He stumbles backward, makes it a few steps, and then he is right back in the same spot and the man who isn’t in any way the man Sammy loves is standing closer, looming. Sammy turns to run and then he is facing back up the mountain and the man with oil pouring out of his mouth is close enough to kiss.

And he kisses Sammy.

He catches Sammy’s lower lip. His mouth is boiling, but Sammy recognizes every crease, recognizes the way Jack tugs on his lip, the way he pulls back every few seconds to kiss again. The oil tastes like black and nothing else, and it pours into Sammy’s mouth, going down into the center of him. Sammy gasps it in, trying to find something of Jack in its overwhelming taste, something familiar.

In the dream, Sammy can only see the shape of the man who isn’t Jack’s lips against his own, so his eyes must be closed.

Sammy feels a hand on the back of his neck, loosing his hair, bunching in his hair. He tries to breathe and oil tumbles out from the corners of their lips, where their mouths don’t touch. Even as he gasps for air, he leans into the touch.

Their chests don’t meet, and he wonders why.

_“—mmy?”_

He wakes in the dark to the sound of his name, over and over, in a voice he knows better than his own. He struggles behind the closed door of his dream while the voice hits him like radio static, thin but insistent.

Disoriented, his brain says _Jack,_ but he is still enough in sleep that the word doesn’t make it past his throat. He opens his eyes to see Ben sideways, almost at his level, and his brain says Jack. He twitches his hands into fists but one of them doesn’t move. Panic floods him, and then he sees Ben, sitting on the bed with a shock of bedhead, holding his hand. Ben’s old blanket covers Sammy’s body overtop the covers, and Ben is on the edge of it. He could have been there for minutes.

“Are you awake?” Ben says.

“I think so.” Sammy’s mouth is stale and raw, his chest hot and sticky. His pulse beats heavy in his chest, his arms, his temples. He runs his tongue over this teeth, tasting for oil, but his mouth only tastes like sleep. It is terrifying, being something he can taste and feel inside of him. Being alive.

Ben looks down at their hands, up past Sammy, and eventually at Sammy’s face. “Nightmare?”

“I… I honestly don’t remember anything before you woke me up.” Black and deeper black; trees with black trunks and black leaves; a man with black eyes and black teeth and a black tongue touching Sammy’s lips.

Ben says, “Really? Because you were… well, it’s not a big deal, really, as long as you’re okay.”

Sammy knows what Ben wants him to say, knows that he wants an explanation or acknowledgement, but he cracks a wry grin. “Yeah, I’m okay. What’s a bad dream going to do to good old Sammy Stevens?”

“You sound really shaken,” says Ben.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You can tell me.”

“I don’t remember.”

Ben sighs. “I’m not gonna—you know I’m not gonna pry. Just…” Ben looks like he’s going to say something else, but his face shifts. “Leave the door open, okay?”

* * *

And Sammy is woken, often, by the sound of Ben in the shower. He wakes and the dark blue sky through the blinds could be late dusk or early dawn. He reaches for his alarm clock, for his phone, eyes stuck together with sleep and the shapes of Ben’s living room looming and indistinguishable. Both lamps shine on his hands, on his stiff eyelids.

Through the thin walls, Sammy can hear the shower running. He pulls the blankets up around his throat and listens to the water hitting ceramic. Let the night come, or the morning. Let Ben come and shake him awake. Let the day find him looking at it.

Ben’s voice reaches him as though through an aquarium tank or at the far end of an airport walkway. At first he is humming, a power-ballad melody Sammy has never heard. As Sammy closes his eyes in the hope that he finds his way back into sleep, Ben’s voice opens up into the refrain. Every word is clear, his pitch relaxed but resonant.

Ben is belting when the water shuts off, and in the silence, the sound is rich and overwhelming. It slips under the door to echo through the living room. Ben holds a note for what seems like an hour, and then he laughs and says, his voice pitched, “Hell yeah! Fuck!”

Jack would have liked Ben, Sammy thinks.

Ben gets out a few quieter, vibrato-heavy “Oh, yeaheahahs.” But when the bathroom door opens, Ben falls abruptly silent. The light comes through, the steam hitting him underneath Ben’s blankets. Suddenly the barrier between them is broken. Suddenly, Sammy is afraid to know whether Ben has dressed in the bathroom or if he is in just a towel and unruly hair, at-ease with Sammy or unthinking. From the head of the futon, Sammy cannot see Ben in the hallway.

“You should do an album,” says Sammy in a voice that sounds more annoyed than impressed. “A one-man rendition of _Rent._ ”

“I’m not that good,” says Ben. He steps into the living room. He has sweatpants on, and a t-shirt bunched around his neck. His hair is as bad as Sammy imagined, parts of it sticking two inches into the air. Sammy looks up the ceiling as Ben pulls the shirt down.

“If you can sing like that in the goddamn shower, I think you can handle the _Tango: Maureen_.”

Ben’s t-shirt reads I’VE GOT 99 PROBLEMS AND THE SCIENCE INSTITUTE IS ABOUT 98 OF THEM. He stops in the doorway, looking at Sammy as though entering the room would be an act of violation. Sammy squeezes his eyes shut.

Ben says, “Any requests for breakfast? We’ve gotta go grocery shopping in the next couple of days, so make your list, but I should have enough to keep you fed until then.”

“You don’t have to,” says Sammy. He understands why children close their eyes in the face of fear; it is so the danger cannot see it in their eyes.

Ben says, “Eggs it is.”

* * *

Because Ben makes breakfast, because Ben insists on washing the dishes and Sammy’s hands shake enough that he doesn’t pursue it, because Sammy wanders into the kitchen at the smell of cheese melting in scrambled eggs, Sammy takes it upon himself to make dinner.

In someone else’s home, every meal is an offering. Sammy wants to say _thank you_ so he catches Ben at lunch and says “Leave it to me.” Ben says, “Are you sure you’re up for it?” and Sammy says “It’s only cooking.”

Sammy has to make do with what Ben has in his fridge and cupboards, because Ben won’t give him the keys to the car and the grocery store is too far away to walk.

He can hear Ben’s loud telephone voice in the bedroom even with the door closed. Ben is saying, “He’s fine, he’s with me.”

Despite the numerous occasions Sammy has spent in Ben’s apartment, he’s never had the opportunity to acquaint himself with the kitchen. He opens drawers, pulls out crockery and puts it back, washes uncleaned bowls. He makes his way slowly through the room.

Even with the door pulled shut, Sammy can hear Ben saying, in careful tones, “Of course I’m worried. But I believe in him. Oh. No, maybe in a couple days.” Sammy imagines Ben lying on his bed like a teenager, feet dangling off the end, watching the ceiling.

Sammy tries to hold a recipe in his mind, prep time and ingredients and oven temp, but is foiled by Ben’s complete lack of vegetables, fresh or frozen, except for a couple of unhusked ears of corn in a bag on the counter. Or maybe he is foiled by Ben’s voice, Ben even now not letting him be.

All the focus of the night before has vanished, the precise tunnel-vision of planning his escape. Sammy sets an opened box of pasta on the counter and stares at its instructions with blank eyes. When with Ben Arnold, eat as Ben Arnold does, he thinks, and smiles bitterly to himself.

Among Ben’s haphazard piles of paper—it is amazing that this man continues to pay his bills on time—Sammy finds a _Ron Begley For Mayor_ pen, and he starts a grocery list on a torn receipt. It takes some time to put everything together, the cupboard doors all open and the pen halting in his hand.

Ben is saying, “I love you” as though the words gather more weight every time he says them. Sammy closes his eyes, but then he only hears _I love you_ in the dark.

When Sammy carries the pot to the stove, water sloshes out of it to puddle on the counter and drip onto the floor, his bare feet. Every action is disjointed: his hands reaching for the kitchen rag, pouring salt into the water, switching on the stove. His hands shake so hard that pasta scatters across the gas stove, catching fire.

“Fuck,” snarls Sammy. He shuts the stove off but flames still lick up the side of the pot. “Fuck me.”

Ben appears in the doorway, hand over the phone mic, with slippers on his feet and curls falling in his eyes. Sammy looks at him with helpless frustration.

Ben says, “I have to call you back,” and sets the phone on the table. Sammy’s hands are still shaking, so he backs away.

When the fire has been put out, the pot emptied, the burnt noodles sizzling in the sink, Ben says, “It’s okay, Sammy.”

Sammy bites the inside of his cheek. Ben steps forward and takes Sammy’s hands, and then both their hands are shaking. But Ben’s dark eyes are calm and don’t move from Sammy’s, his fingers soft. Sammy looks down, the spasming of his arms fading in increments, and is unable to make fists with Ben holding him still.

“What good am I?” says Sammy roughly.

“Look at me.” Ben reaches up and rests his palm against the back of Sammy’s hairline, and Sammy drops his head. Ben’s hand is cool from the phone, his grip steady, and Sammy lets his eyes stay closed for a few long seconds. “Shit happens. It’s okay. Whatever you’re beating yourself up about, it’s okay. The house is still intact, and, more importantly, you are.”

“I try to repay you and I end up setting your kitchen on fire.”

Ben’s face is so close to Sammy’s that it’s all Sammy can focus on, but not close enough to be blurry. His eyes are steady, but his lips twitch into a smile he probably doesn’t notice, soft and safe. Sammy could fall into a smile like that.

“Did the smoke alarm go off? Is there any actual damage? We’re in the clear, man.” Ben’s voice is patient and warm, his energy contained.

Sammy breathes and watches Ben’s shoulders rise a second after he inhales, their harmony arrhythmic but close enough to feel in sync.

“I’m more than happy for you to give yourself a few days to get used to… well, everything, again. Hell, take a few weeks. Listen to me, Sammy. You’ve already repaid me more than you can ever know. You’re _here_. Just… take your time.”

* * *

Ben picks up a basket while Sammy wheels the world’s squeakiest shopping cart into the grocery store. It was the running out of eggs that convinced Ben, and the stale cereal he settled for, not Sammy waving the list in his face or pushing him toward the door. Sammy’s shopping list has expanded from the back of one receipt to three. These are not the meticulous meal plans he kept at his own place, where he would buy just enough to last him, with the help of the freezer, to the end of the week. This time, he wrote the list to stock up Ben’s supplies.

When Ben realizes Sammy has prepared for a cartload of food, he turns and puts the basket back. Returning to Sammy, he scowls. “Is this the part where you laugh at me about everything I put in the cart?”

“Considering the state of your kitchen? Absolutely,” Sammy deadpans.

They stop before the produce, and Ben waits until Sammy is looking to pull a face. People part around them, pushing squeaky carts through the narrow space between Ben and the cucumbers. The sprinklers turn on over the produce, and Ben jumps.

Sammy picks up a box of strawberries and turns it over, examining the bright and heavy red for bad spots. Summer is coming, and he is coming with it. He says, “You would die in a zombie apocalypse.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. Produce rots, man. I’m not stupid.”

“You have nothing in your cupboards. You have a pantry and you don’t even use it.”

Ben scoffs, looking from Sammy to Sammy’s hands on the cart, to the fruit displays. “The only stuff that goes in a pantry is shit nobody looks at for ten years. That, and a lot of soup. Which, come to think of it, is something nobody looks at for about ten years, Sammy.”

“Yeah? Tell me your zombie survival plan, then, smart guy.”

“I’m just saying, zombies couldn’t compete with this medium rage.”

“I’ll bet on that. Channel that medium rage into something productive, like identifying the broccoli.”

Ben fumes. “Don’t raise your eyebrow at me. Jack-in-the-Box Jesus. I wish I could do that. Also, I know what broccoli is.”

Sammy laughs. “Then get me some.”

When Ben returns, Sammy continues. “I’m not saying you’d be the first to go, but I am saying starvation from stale Frosted Flakes and nothing else would absolutely do you in.”

This is how it goes: Sammy combs the store row by row while Ben scatters, carrying loose items he drops in the cart before turning tail at Sammy’s raised eyebrow; Sammy lays groceries out in a grid in the cart while Ben tosses them haphazardly on top; Sammy crosses items off, his pen going through the paper.

It is good to have this hour in the store. It is good to have something to focus on, a task broken down into parts for him to complete; to click the pen in his hand and smooth the paper, to startle at Ben’s footsteps as he jogs up the aisle to meet him. The cart piles with cans, cuts of meat, cereal. The cart squeals at every turn.

It feels like building a life.

Sammy keeps his head down but people look at him anyway, people whose faces and voices he recognizes when they call his name and who he doesn’t look at. His hands are tight on the handle, his breaths deliberate. He stares at his list until his dry eyes sting, willing the crowds to part around him. There are more people in his mind than there are in the aisle.

Sammy thinks it is a show, Ben’s indignation, his exaggerated affect, to put Sammy at ease. So when Ben bags the last item, Sammy says, quickly, taking out his card, “I’m paying.”

And when they are in the car, idling in park, Sammy leans forward, resting his head on his hands and his hands on the dashboard. The seatbelt alarm pings insistently, but Sammy keeps his eyes closed.

“Took a lot out of you, huh?” says Ben.

Sammy says, voice shaky, “Let’s just say that wasn’t my favorite shopping run.”

He feels Ben’s hand hover over his shoulder a second before Ben touches him. He looks up, out through the dashboard, and can tell Ben is looking at him.

“Come on,” says Ben. “Seatbelt. Let’s go home.”

* * *

And through it all, Jack. Jack under his fingernails, Jack in the pulse in his ear at night, Jack on the other side of the front door Sammy is not opening. Jack just one aisle away in the grocery store, waiting for Sammy to reach him so he can jump up on the cart and glide. Jack in Sammy’s meal preps, because Sammy is prepping for two, now, in a way he hasn’t had to for over three years.

Ben opens the fridge the way Jack did, arm resting on the fridge door to the elbow so it doesn’t swing. Ben shovels food into his mouth the way Jack did, intermittently, as though he cannot still his thoughts in order to take a bite and therefore must make full use of the moments he can spare.

He talks with his mouth full and grins and waves his spoon for emphasis. He combs through _The Gazette_ with a pen in hand and circles factual inaccuracies, and then, just to be petty, stray apostrophes. He drives with his hands loose on the wheel and his fingers moving as he talks; he hums at the computer and types loud enough Sammy can hear him at the front door; he doesn’t rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, but he always puts the tablet in the moment the steam has dissipated. These are Ben things, things Sammy will never again find all in one place.

And Ben has a piece of torn composition paper stuck to the fridge. It reads, CRONKITE, BROKAW.

* * *

Ben wakes him often or wakes to him. Ben sits at his bedside and talks him through the night, so Sammy begins to expect from the morning the shape of Ben’s shoulders beside him. Some days Ben sits for hours on the coffee table, at the foot of Sammy’s bed, on the floor with his back to the mattress to give Sammy privacy. Ben’s voice becomes a comfort in the night, soft and sweet and sleep-rough.

Sammy falls back to sleep with his hand in Ben’s, for something to prove he is real.

This is what happens: before bed, Ben walks through the house turning all the lights off. He starts in front hall and kitchen and ends in his bedroom. It is early afternoon, and sunlight filters through the blinds, falling in bright patches across the carpets. Sammy follows half a minute behind him, turning the lights back on. The light on the far side of the sofa never goes off, even when Sammy is awake. When Ben asks him, at breakfast, Sammy says he’ll pay the electric bill.

Sammy doesn’t want to wake in the dark and not know where he is, because he doesn’t know where he is in the light, either. He wakes disoriented most nights, grasping for something he can’t put a name on. It’s not Jack, and he doesn’t know which is scarier.

Some days Sammy wakes dizzy, the world flattened like city streets from the top of a skyscraper. Some days he wakes to black oil dripping from the corners of the ceiling. He doesn’t realize his mouth is making sound until he sees Ben’s mouth opening with no sound at all. The hand on Sammy’s arm is cold, and Sammy doesn’t recognize it as a hand for a long time. Ben’s eyes are drenched in black, and it slides down his face to plunk on his shirt, in his lap, on their hands. In his panic, Sammy grips Ben’s hand until he hears a sharp hiss.

“Sammy,” Ben’s voice is saying, as though underwater. “It’s over now. It’s okay.”

“It won’t,” says Sammy, in the disorientation of sleep. “Not you, too, I—” He can’t tell if he is awake or dreaming, but he can’t move and the fear is so big on his chest his pulse threatens to push right out of his skin.

When Sammy can make Ben out, Ben has warm eyes with lots of white around his irises, and a worn pajama t-shirt (reading SUGARGLIDERS HAPPEN) with a collar so stretched from use that Sammy can almost see Ben’s shoulders.

“Ben?” Sammy says.

“The one and only.”

“Did I wake you?” Sammy’s voice scrapes in the back of his throat, aches. It doesn’t sound like his voice; it sounds like there is a barrier between him and his words.

“Yeah,” says Ben. “But it’s okay.”

And Sammy knows that whoever was holding him while the dark fell down like water wasn’t Ben, with his warm eyes and hair that falls over his ears and light freckles across his collarbone. The midday sun falls on his hair, on the lines of his cheekbones, on the peach fuzz across his chin. Sammy looks through Ben straight to the trees. Out the window, a skinny conifer waves between the glass and the sun, reaching for the glass.

“It’s not okay,” says Sammy.

Ben studies him for a long time, eyes gentle, and Sammy realizes that Ben’s hand in his is warm. Ben tucks the blanket around Sammy’s neck. “Do you need to get some sleeping pills?”

Sammy says, “I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Do you want to talk?”

“I want to get back to sleep.”

Ben looks at him with a curious expression on his face. “Actually, I have a better idea.”

“Okay, you know that’s a pick-up line, right?”

Ben colors. “Well, yeah, but you know I didn’t mean it like that. Hear me out. You don’t sleep through the night.”

“I sleep fine.”

“You don’t sleep through the night,” says Ben resolutely. Sammy pushes himself up, leaning on his arms against the squeaking bed. “Well, night for us. And we don’t have a show to run. So you and me, we’re gonna stay up until it’s dark tomorrow and we’re so exhausted we can’t see. Reset our sleep schedule.”

“I don’t,” says Sammy, and he doesn’t know how to finish it, how to say: _I don’t want to face the light._

Ben seems to take it as confirmation, because he’s grinning. “It’ll be fine. I’ve got video games, movies, a repertoire of amazing conversation starters.”

“That you absolutely do not.”

“Maybe not, but that’s because you know all my tricks already.”

With his shoulders free of the covers, Sammy shivers. “You’d better not say we’re waking up at seven a.m. I like knowing where I am when I wake up.”

“Seven a.m.’s off the table, got it. But I think it’s a circadian rhythm thing? It’ll do you good, Sammy. It’ll do both of us good.”

Sammy’s voice is weary. “Please just let me sleep.”

But neither man nor God can stop Ben Arnold when he has an idea. “The worst of us always hits when it’s dark. I’ve seen it in you, too. So we sleep through it, wake up at the reasonable hour of, say, eight o’clock.”

And Sammy looks away.

Every day, Sammy has to look in the eyes a man who has seen him at his lowest and pretend that is not all that Ben sees. Every day, he has to pretend that there is a way to move past the worst of him, when all his life, the only way to deny it was to cut and run.

Or the real question: how much of the fight in him was just another way of running away?

How many detentions had he landed himself in through high school? How many scenes in the parking lot? How many times had he chewed his lip and looked at the bookshelves while the principal droned on about respecting his teachers, imagining split lips and black eyes? How many times had he slammed the door so hard the doorframe shattered?

But Ben’s eyes are steady. Sammy sits all the way up and rubs his face. As he does so, Ben’s fingers squeeze his, pull gently away.

Ben says, “You’re drenched in sweat. Why don’t you go take a shower?”

Sammy becomes aware of the sticky cold covering his body. When he looks down at his shirt, he sees dark patches down his clavicle, beneath his chest. “Yeah,” he says.

But he stays there with his hand in Ben’s for minutes before pushing the covers down, not talking, not even looking at each other. Not needing to.

When Sammy comes out of the shower, fully dressed, Ben has made popcorn. The television is running at low volume, and Sammy has to duck back into the bathroom. He rests his head on the door, pushing the towel hanging from the hook to the side. As his eyes unfocus on the towel, he breathes. He can’t face Ben, not with that smile, Ben with his eager affections and warm eyes and voice quick to say _I love you_ with such intensity, such absolute conviction, that if this were the sea, it would be a riptide.

It is as though Ben hasn’t seen Sammy, truly, hasn’t seen the parts of Sammy that he thought for so long Jack was refusing to see, the ugly parts, the anger, the fear. But it wasn’t refusal. It was clarity. And Ben’s eyes are clear, too, something Sammy will never get used to.

“How about something we can laugh to?” says Sammy when he emerges. Ben has the overhead off and the blinds shut but the floor lamp is still glowing. “ _Ferris Bueller_?”

“You’re dating yourself,” says Ben.

“What? I am not. Everybody loves _Ferris Bueller._ ”

“That’s where you’re wrong, because every choice Ferris makes triggers a physical panic response in me.”

Sammy laughs. “Maybe you just don’t like it because you’d be Cameron.”

Ben holds up a finger. “Um. I would never smash up my father’s car.”

“Really? You’ve never been that angry?”

“Okay, I’d be angry, but I’d never smash a car. May I remind you, medium rage.”

Sammy tries again, halting. “Have you… have you ever been so angry it was either destroy something or destroy yourself, and then you ended up doing both just to satisfy it? Anger that felt like a glacier lodged inside you, like it was, I don’t know, squeezing out your heart? So angry you thought maybe the anger was more a part of you than you were? So angry the word _angry_ didn’t mean anything anymore, or fury, or rage, or any of the things we say about it? You just had to feed it and keep feeding it, and—” his voice dips to a whisper “—and I thought it was all that was left of me.”

Ben is looking at him strangely, popcorn in a hand raised halfway to his mouth. He lowers his hand. “It’s not. That’s not—you’re not—that’s not what I see in you. Like, at all. Ever.”

 _New Jack,_ says Lily in his head, and he can’t shut her up.

Sammy looks ahead at the TV playing a rerun of some 90s series stretched to fit Ben’s flatscreen, but it’s blurry, and not just because of the video quality. “It’s a dark place, Ben.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. And it leads to other dark places. I can’t shake it off. It keeps—I just wind up back there, no matter what.” Like there’s nothing left of him but his bones heavy and red, his hands to big for his body and his voice too cold. _You could bring a country to its knees with a voice like that,_ someone once told him, or maybe it was a dream.

Ben’s voice is soft. In the half light, his cheekbones are prominent, his eyes dark., “Dark like the place you’re in now?”

“Not exactly.”

“You’ll be okay,” says Ben. “We’ll make it through this. Nothing’s gonna mess with my best friend. Not even that very same best friend.”

“If you’re drowning,” Sammy intones, the phrase an old friend, but he doesn’t finish it.

For the first time, maybe, he doesn’t want to.

They sit on the sofa bed, propped up against Sammy’s pillows. The springs give beneath them, and even with the bowl of popcorn settled between their thighs, their bodies slide to close the distance. It is easy to be here, beside Ben, Ben seeing him in ways he is not used to being seen, Ben reaching for his hand in the popcorn bowl and saying, “Then I’ll always be here to pull you up.”

“Always,” says Sammy. “Huh. That’s a thought. Always.”

Ben squeezes his hand. “Always.”

* * *

Late that evening, when the buzzer goes off, Ben shouts from the bathroom, “Get it for me.” They are forty-five minutes into their second movie, Ben’s pick, _Terminator 2: Judgment Day_ (“Gotta brush up on current events somehow,” he quipped), and Sammy has just emptied a microwave popcorn bag into the bowl full of kernels he took from Ben after Ben choked on one.

“Get it yourself,” Sammy grumbles, microwave door open, and goes down the hall.

In the doorway, Emily looks like a wraith, her wavy hair cropped an inch above her shoulders and a white raincoat fastened around her neck. She glances up when Sammy opens the door—obviously she was expecting someone of a shorter stature—but she beams.

“Hey, Sammy,” she says in her sweet voice. “Ben told me you’d be here.”

“To what do we owe the pleasure, Emily?”

“Benny invited me, of course. And I got off early tonight – the library’s closed for a middle school summer event, so I’ll be heading back later to clean up, but until then…”

He is looking at her and he is looking at the absence of her in the air, the steps and the high window through which a solitary streetlight peeks, her raincoat glittering like pearls. She takes it off and drapes it over an arm.

Sammy steps aside to let Emily in. “Are you here to support the Ben Arnold Sleep Schedule Campaign?”

She giggles and enters the apartment. “I’ll gladly pledge to the cause. It’s sweet of Benny to take you in. Oh.” Emily unzips a pocket of the rain jacket and pulls out a large Ziploc bag of cookies. “I brought you a little something. Call it housewarming.”

“Oh, Emily,” says Sammy. “You didn’t need to. It’s not even the holidays.”

“My favorite boys need a pick-me-up every now and then,” she tells him. She opens the closet door, at home in Ben’s apartment.

Sammy says, “Okay, well, you take those in to Ben—”

“I’m here,” Ben’s voice announces from around the corner. “Emily. Hello. I hope my roommate has been—”

“Wonderful as always.” Emily turns back to Sammy, her eyes shrewd. “They’re not just for Ben, the cookies.”

Sammy says, “I was going to say, And I’ll find a bowl to put them in.”

Emily beams. There is no hint of wraith in her expression, in her white teeth and thick brows, in the hand she raises to her mouth, self-consciously touches to her nose, and then drops. She removes her shoes and kisses Ben, right there in the hallway, while Sammy disappears into the kitchen.

In the living room, Ben has his hands in Emily’s hair. Sammy sits on the floor with his back to a pillow propped against the sofa arm, one knee up. The popcorn bowl now sits between Ben’s legs, and Sammy has to reach up, dropping kernels on the carpet.

Sammy has sat cross-legged on the floor while Jack teased out strands of his own hair, Jack’s fingers falling away from Sammy’s scalp, Jack saying, “It’s getting long again, maybe I should see about the kitchen scissors, after all,” and Sammy laughing. Jack saying, “Snip, snip,” and making air scissors on Sammy’s hair.

He has been feeling Ben’s eyes on him for a few minutes before he looks up from the movie.

“I know this is new, and if you’re shy about me and Emily,” begins Ben.

“No, no, you’re young and in love and at liberty to be all over each other, even more than you are now.”

Ben says, “Yeah, uh, I don’t think that’s either of our styles. But seriously, man, if it’s—”

“I’m not jealous,” says Sammy. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s different.” He says it as an afterthought, but Ben picks up the remote and clicks it at the box.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sammy can see Ben’s hands resume their motion in Emily’s hair. After a beat, he feels fingers tousling his own hair, and glances up. Ben is smiling.

“We love you too, buddy,” says Ben. “You’re part of it too.”

“Not in the same way,” Sammy says.

Ben laughs. “No, not in the same way. But you’re part of the family. Part of all this love.”

“Yeah,” says Sammy, and closes his eyes. “Part of the family. Ben Arnold. Emily Potter.”

“Sammy Stevens,” says Emily.

* * *

Aside from the grocery list, which Sammy updates every week, Sammy lays out a weekly meal plan. He stays home half the time when Ben goes shopping, late afternoon out of habit even though they now wake to the sun and sleep through most of the night, but he calls Ben at the store to talk him through the selection of produce.

He buys Tupperware and stocks up Ben’s freezer with homemade meals. He stockpiles what seems like a year’s supply of overnight oats (Ben chooses the milk). He starts living like he expects to wake up in the morning, to reap what the night before has sown.

Ben says, once, after Sammy has set his oats before him, “You really seem to be coming alive.”

“I’m doing basic upkeep. It wouldn’t kill you to wipe down the stove once a week.”

Ben says, “Yeah, um, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that _every_ week.”

“Do you know absolutely nothing about how to run a house?” He says it with laughter on his lips.

“Well, I am glad that you do,” says Ben. “But also, please don’t act like I don’t know how to take care of shit. I’ve been doing it on my own longer than you know, okay?”

Sammy throws up his hands in surrender, but it’s more violent than he intended. “Okay, I get it.”

“That’s what having a single mother does. Sorry I’m not a neat freak like you.”

Sammy turns abruptly, and the blank hallway wall stares back at him, the long dresser with its row of photographs. His voice is a low rumble. “Jack-in-the-Box Jesus.”

Ben continues, “But I’m not a slob. I know I don’t eat as well as you, and that sometimes I leave shit places you don’t like.”

“That’s where we’re going, huh? Sorry you’re not good enough for me? You know that’s not true.”

Ben’s spoon clatters on the table behind Sammy. “Then don’t act like it’s true!” Sammy says nothing, and he hears Ben take a shaky breath. “You really know how to ruin a guy’s morning. All this, and I just wanted to say thank you. The oats are delicious, and I know you made them with love. I wanted to say it’s good to see you like this. To get to see you like this. It’s really a privilege, Sammy.” His voice is soft. “You have no idea.”

* * *

More and more, Ben hovers in the kitchen while Sammy cooks, sits at the table with his work or a book (with the amount of free time he has, he finishes two a week). He passes Sammy ingredients from the fridge or the restocked pantry, both of them trying not to look at each other. It is as though the space is theirs over meals but no one’s at all during the preparation, a sea with a table like a boat and two men with soaked hems trying to make it through.

Sammy crosses the room from counter to fridge and catches Ben’s eyes following him. “Do you want to give it a spin?”

“What, cooking? Sure, I’ll put on pasta for later.”

Sammy sighs. “Perhaps I should phrase this differently. Would you be willing to learn a recipe?”

Ben puts the book down flat on the table, spine up. A second later, he picks it up and puts his finger between the pages. “I’d only mess it up.”

Sammy turns on the faucet and wets his hands. “Do you want to help me out?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you want me to. I thought it was something you wanted control over, so I was just letting you have that control. I didn’t want to impose. I figured you needed… figured you needed your time.”

With the back of his hand, Sammy pushes loose strands of hair off his forehead. “I want it to be your time, too.”

Ben folds a receipt into the book and rises. “Well, I’m not going to say no to learning a Sammy recipe.”

“Then a Sammy recipe it is.”

Sammy writes the recipe for Ben on the back of a receipt left on the fridge, insists Ben wash his hands. Ben is not uncomfortable in the kitchen, but it is clear he hasn’t diced onions since high school and doesn’t know which way to hold them. Sammy holds his wrist, shows him how to slide the knife down and keep the tip on the cutting board.

They stand close as they move through the small kitchen, fall into rhythm, and Sammy wonders if this is how Jack and Lily felt, if this is what it is like to have a brother, to be unconcerned and comfortable and unaware of another body as a body but as a space that love fills.

It is easier to exist in this space without Ben’s nervous glances, his presence uncertain in the corners of Sammy’s vision. It is easier to brush shoulders or hands slick with salt or olive oil and laugh into the same air.

And for the first time, Sammy realizes that this space belongs to both of them.

* * *

Sammy’s hands heal. The Band-Aids peel off in the sink where he washes the dishes, in his sofa bed, in the car. Hansel and Gretel with their breadcrumbs have nothing on Sammy Stevens. But the dreams don’t stop.

In the dreams he is walking through the apartment, phasing through the kitchen like a ghost. He is switching out the television cables while Ben paces the living room muttering _Emily, Emily._ Ben goes to the door to let Emily in, but when he comes back, only the wind follows him, arm-in-arm.

All this talk of love leaves Sammy sick in his dreams, his heart a stone held up by his tongue, his body ragdolled and lurching.

In the dreams he wakes and isn’t tired. Ben is in the shower and his song is all through the apartment, and it is all about love. Sammy thinks shop: brussels sprouts, water stains on the bathroom floor, green curtains over the crooked blinds.

Sammy leaves Ben and goes to the grocery store. While he’s there, a humming comes on through the speakers, hovering over every top 100. It is a voice saying _love, love,_ and Sammy isn’t sure where he’s heard it before. He goes aisle by aisle, compelled to read every label in full. Ben will know if he brings home the wrong kind of milk, whole grain pasta, cereal with strawberries. After daily value percentages, the labels read:

_You are young and Jack Wright has just graduated college. The two of you are sitting on his campus green for the last time with 7-11 sandwiches and sweet tea and the sun on your hair, the little folder with Jack’s degree at your feet._

_He is getting grass stains all over his gown and his fingers. You pretend you are not looking at his fingers. His shoes are off and you touch his knee with yours while birds wheel through the sky to land in the highest branches and you don’t know how much you love him yet._

* * *

_The first time Jack looks at you like you are the world, you don’t notice, because everywhere he looks he has love in his eyes. Jack is always looking at you like he is trying to see underneath your skin where the ribs meet: in the studio, at red lights, over breakfast with his mouth full when you glance over the top of your newspaper._

_The first time might have been the fifth time, the tenth, might have slid like a second hand from what it was to what it would be._

_Much later he laughs in the apartment you share with his sister, says,_ I can’t believe you couldn’t tell. I know I’m not subtle. _You keep hearing his voice saying that. So of course you don’t say you were scared of what it might mean. If you had seen him the first time, if you hadn’t been so afraid to honor what you are, maybe all of this could have been sidestepped. Maybe you could be waking up every morning, now, next to your husband._

* * *

And Sammy passes days like dreams, too, intermittent series of days where he can’t see past the blank living room walls. The television runs like it’s underwater; Ben talks like he’s underwater and Sammy looks straight through his chest without reading his t-shirt. Sammy changes out of his pajamas only to change right back. He puts on Ben’s slippers and paces the length of the front hallway so often Ben stops poking his head out of his bedroom; he puts his forehead against the front door and quiets his breathing and tries to feel what is waiting out there, dark as his fingernails in negative light.

On days like these, he and Ben are bodies in space, passing each other without stirring the air between them. Ben’s eyes could be glass. We want to see mirrors in each other’s eyes, Sammy thinks, or windows, so he stops looking.

Dishes build up in the sink (they never use enough crockery to fill the dishwasher), and when Sammy opens the freezer for a quick meal, he calls Ben’s name.

Ben looks hard at Sammy’s eyes. He shrugs and says, “Yeah, sure, I’ll take care of it. You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” says Sammy.

Some mornings, Sammy wakes with his head at the foot of the bed and the sheets perfectly flipped. The rest of the day stay flipped: Ben walks along the ceiling; Sammy dries the dishes and then scrubs the dry off; Sammy checks labels to make sure they say what they’re supposed to say, and they do.

There is a singing in his ears that flares up when the front door opens, a cacophony in monotone. He turns off the A/C but it sings nonetheless. Ben talks and it hums over him, whispers like a choir in off-beat harmonies or an indie rock band practicing on the other side of the house.

Ben cancels plans on these days, looks at Sammy when Sammy isn’t looking back and decides. He plays MarioKart with Sammy and wins, performs makeshift audiobooks in the living room, phones the animal shelter and passes the questions along to Sammy. He ties Sammy’s hair up when Sammy’s hands shake.

* * *

Because all Sammy’s furniture is rented in the apartment he doesn’t go back to, Ben brings his laptop into the kitchen. They sit side-by-side and scroll through images of single bedframes while the yellow light reflects off the screen. Sammy tells Ben it doesn’t matter to him, that he can stay in the living room until he gets back on his feet, and Ben says, “Where would you go?”

Sammy stops with his hand over Ben’s on the mouse. “What?”

Ben’s voice is soft. “Where would you go?” He has his wallet open on the coffee table, a credit card on his knee.

Sammy sighs, turns his head so he can’t feel the weight of Ben’s gaze on him, but he feels it anyway. “No, you’re right. My place isn’t my place anymore, and… well, that’s the long and short of it, isn’t it?”

Ben says, “I don’t want you to be alone there.”

“You’re making this a much bigger deal than it is,” says Sammy, because he has to say something, because he can’t put words on the empty house that used to be his, not in front of Ben. “I’m more than happy with the bed you’ve made up for me.”

“I think you’ll like having your own door,” says Ben. His fingers twitch beneath Sammy’s hand, and he pulls up a simple frame. Sammy is not looking at the screen.

“You know,” says Sammy, “I’m kind of growing fond of waking to your elephant feet.”

“Shut up.”

“And seeing you, and knowing I’m not alone.”

“I’ll get a blow-up mattress for your room, just for me,” says Ben, solemnly.

Ben spends days in the spare room (a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, half-occupied with DVDs and video games; a desk; some recording equipment), cleaning, sometimes, but also just sitting on the floor or in the desk chair staring out the window or at the door, waiting for Sammy to knock for lunch. He says he wants to take care of this alone, says it’s his house and Sammy is his guest. There is something funny in his voice when he says _guest._

With Sammy’s help, he pushes the desk to the corner of the room, so that one, turning in the chair, can see out the window. Once it is in place, once they lay down the chair mat, Sammy sits in the rolling chair and takes his hair down. Ben rests his palms on the back of the chair, so his knuckles brush Sammy’s back.

It is a home, and it’s his to share, and he closes his eyes to hold in the wonder of it.

* * *

After they’ve assembled the bedframe, Sammy empties his suitcase into the dresser. He tucks Jack’s suitcases into the far corner, half obscuring the closet doors. At first he works alone, contemplating old t-shirts and odd socks. He sits on the bed, unfolding and refolding everything he touches, his legs too heavy to cross the room on. It feels like the packing, the blank days considering the curtains instead of clothes to bring, only in reverse.

But Ben doesn’t let Sammy fall into a pattern. The first afternoon, Ben wanders into the room without saying a word. He sets a bowl of thick mac-n-cheese on the desk and presses the spoon into Sammy’s hand. His eyes are bright and soft, so warm you could fall into them and forget all about the winter. Azaleas in spring, light on the bay, t-shirts in the humid sunrise every Christmas.

Ben starts a game of Solitaire on Sammy’s bed with a deck of Star Wars playing cards in a little tin. He sits cross-legged and rests his elbows on his knees, facing Sammy but not looking at him. Sammy glances over every time he crosses the room, the sideways afternoon light through the window catching on Ben’s skin, surrounding his hair.

When he’s finished, Sammy slides the empty suitcase under the bed, and then he takes Jack’s and slides them under the bed as well. It feels like coming home, his books on the desk, his clothes in the open dresser drawers, Ben on his bed with slippers kicked onto the floor, looking up.

* * *

“You can stay here,” says Ben one evening before bed, muffled. He pokes his head out of the bathroom, in his pajamas with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. Sammy, sitting on his bed with the covers folded back, looks up from his book. He can just see Ben’s head, lips are white with toothpaste.

“Well, yeah, I am staying here,” says Sammy.

“That’s not—” Ben pulls the toothbrush out of his mouth, but still he is careful not to open his mouth too wide. “No, like permanently. You don’t have to go back anywhere. You can stay here.”

“Ben,” says Sammy, voice heavy. Ben ducks into the bathroom to spit, and when he emerges, he scrubs his teeth vigorously.

Sammy says, “You don’t have to do that for me.”

“As long as you need,” says Ben around the toothbrush. He reaches up to steady it. “Hell, as long as you want. You’re my best friend, and I’ve seen the state of your old place. That’s not a place anyone should have to go back to.”

Sammy sighs. “You’re right. I don’t want to go back there.” He closes the book.

“And you don’t have anywhere else to go,” Ben prompts. Toothpaste builds up in the corners of his mouth.

“Not unless I want to take a leaf out of Lily’s book and live out of a hotel.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.” Ben’s eyes are inscrutable, dark in his position between the gentle lamplight from Sammy’s room and the naked white bulb of the bathroom, the hall dark. His shadows fall in a puddle at his feet.

Sammy raises an eyebrow. “What’s the catch?”

“Um. No catch? Just that I want to make sure that you’re okay.”

When Sammy says nothing, Ben returns to brushing his teeth, but he doesn’t take his eyes from Sammy’s.

“Surely your teeth are clean,” says Sammy.

Ben says, “I just don’t want to lose you. So you’re down?”

Sammy sighs. “You know, I think we’ve been having this conversation over and over, since I got here.” Ben keeps saying _stay,_ and Sammy keeps finding ways to say he can’t. Sammy keeps saying _stay_ and Jack keeps opening tabs, flipping through his notebook, looking away with blue light in his eyes.

“Have we?” says Ben. He dips out of sight again, and Sammy can hear him gargling. When he reappears, Sammy tucks a receipt into his book and sets it on the bedside table. Ben comes into the room and sits beside Sammy on the bed.

“Yeah,” says Sammy, when Ben is situated. “We have. You bought me a bed.”

He is staring at the window at the stars through the conifer and the patch of pale moon on the carpet when he grows aware of the weight of Ben’s gaze. Ben sits straight, one hand on the blanket between their legs, a white patch of toothpaste hardening on his cheek. The light still comes in from the bathroom.

Ben says, “Maybe you’re right. But you haven’t said yes.”

“That’s what you want?” says Sammy.

“Yes.”

Sammy glances up at the place where the shadow of the conifer meets the ceiling. Then he grins, slowly, and when he looks back down, Ben’s lopsided lips are stretching in a perfect mirror. “Yes.”

Ben leans over to bump Sammy’s shoulder with his own, and then, after a moment of hesitation, he rests his weight against Sammy, warm and solid and full of love, the ends of his hair brushing Sammy’s collar. “Hell yeah. Welcome home, Sammy,” he says.

Sammy breathes in, and then he breathes out in a space he now has a name for. “It’s good to be home. It’s good to have a home. It’s good to have you.”

“Good to have you, too, buddy. Yeah. You just let me know the verdict on that air mattress.”

“It’s a yes on that, too,” says Sammy, and when Ben laughs, his whole body shakes against Sammy’s in this place that he can call home.


End file.
